7 Best Free WordPress Lazy Load Plugins 2020

As you build your website, you’ll want to incorporate as many attractive elements as possible. Items such as images catch and retain the attention of your visitors. The downside of pictures and videos is that they slow down the loading speed of pages. The reason for this phenomenon is that they take longer than textual content to load. Visitors will get irritated or bored by a slow website or page and leave. The result is low conversion rates, which is bad news for any website.

However, knowing the importance of images to your website, we can’t ask you not to use them. Instead, we’ll give you a list of the best free WordPress lazy load plugins. At no cost, you can use any of these plugins to make your pages that have any number of images load faster.

7 Best Free WordPress Lazy Load Plugins are listed below :

Lazy Load by WP Rocket

Lazy Load by WP Rocket is a stellar free lazy load plugin that is quickly gaining popularity and has over 90,000 active installations. It supports four languages right from the box. The developers of this plugin are continually improving on it, which explains the regular free updates.

This plugin has all the necessary mechanisms to improve the loading speeds of your pages. It uses thumbnails for all images in post content, iframes, avatars, widget text, or smilies. Without using JavaScript library such as jQuery, the script of the plugin is always below 10kb.

With Lazy Load by WP Rocket, you can even switch YouTube iframes for preview thumbnails to increase the loading speed further.

a3 Lazy Load

a3 Lazy Load is a mobile-first lazy loading plugin, which works seamlessly with the most content-heavy sites. Apart from the choice to activate or deactivate the plugin on your pages, you can also enable or disable lazy loading for posts, pages, custom post types, widgets, post thumbnails, and Gravatars. You can also switch the support for video embeds on and off from the admin panel. This plugin supports lazy loading for video embeds from YouTube, Vimeo, and HTML5 videos.

This plugin supports media added via iframe from any source to content areas and widgets. It is also fully compatible with WordPress embedding on any feature of your website. Right from installation, this plugin is compatible with WordPress AMP and Better AMP plugins.

For a touch of style, a3 Lazy Load comes with fade-in and spinner lazy load effects. You can select a custom Lazy Load pre-load background color too. This plugin is also translation ready.

Jetpack

Jetpack is one of the most popular plugins, with over 5 million active installations. Its popularity is creditable to its multiple purposes, including performance enhancement, site security, and site management.

Jetpack reduces the bandwidth with several strategies. One such tactic is the service of images and static files in the form of CSS and JavaScript from the developer’s server. With this plugin, you get an extensive search for content on your site that doesn’t drain your servers. Via an effective CDN, this plugin delivers unlimited high-speed videos and an incredible image loading experience for mobile users.

You can create and customize your website with Jetpack for unforgettable user experience. You get stats and analytics your site’s performance informing you of what to do to improve your conversion rates. This plugin also offers engaging and robust customization tools that help you personalize your website.

Optimole

Optimole is an impressive image optimization and lazy load plugin that works on your images to optimize the speed of your site. This plugin generates cloud-based URLs and replaces all your image URLs with them. Furthermore, it compresses all your images to the perfect size while retaining their quality. Every month, Optimole caches al the photos on your site for faster delivery and speed.

What’s more, all your images will be responsive on all screen devices since they’ll be scaled and served instantly. Optimole detects retina screens and provides pixel-perfect images. You can also crop images intelligently to retain focus.

Optimole adds watermarks for future images for you. You can serve lower quality images for slow connections. If you want to use Gutenberg, this plugin is fully compatible with the new block editor. The pro version is even more incredible, with many more functional features.

Lazy Loader

Not only does the Lazy Loader plugin support images, but it also supports iframes, videos, and audio media. What makes this free plugin even more appealing is the inclusion of several free add-ons to it.

This plugin also supports lazy loading of background images, scripts, and styles upon manual modification of the markup. Without the need for manual adjustments of the markup, you can lazy load images inserted anywhere on your website. The Lazy Loader also supports lazy loading of iframes, post thumbnails, video, and audio elements.

Other specific options that come with the Lazy Loader include enablement of lazy loading or iframes, poster frames of video elements, audio elements, and inline background images. You can choose to stop the plugin from lazy loading elements with specific CSS classes. Another option is the display of a loading spinner as well as a text area to modify default lazy sizes configuration values.

This plugin also comes with the Lazysizes Native Loading, and the Lazysizes Unveilhooks plugins for more lazy loading functions.

Lazy Load for Videos

Lazy Load for Videos is a fantastic plugin that makes search engines love you with fast loading speeds. It works by replacing embedded videos from Vimeo and YouTube with preview images. The videos will only load if a user clicks on these preview images. This enhancement prevents your site from loading unnecessary JavaScript.

This plugin displays your video titles on the preview images. You can insert ads into your videos and even arrange these videos in a playlist. For YouTube videos, you can remove annotations such as ones asking users to subscribe to channels. Once a video starts loading, you can choose to hide information such as video titles. This plugin allows you to select a custom color for your Vimeo player and even hide controls from the YouTube player.

From the admin panel, you can add custom CSS. Lazy Load works smoothly with multisite and popular WordPress plugins.

Speed Up – Lazy Load

Speed Up is an easy to use lazy loading plugin with unbelievable speed. This plugin is superlight, taking only 5kb.

With this plugin, even your CSS background images will be lazy-loaded. This plugin allows you to set custom background colors on your pre-load thumbnails too. You can decide to lazy load all images on your website for a fast website. However, this plugin allows you to disable lazy load on specific pages or areas.

With this plugin, you also get additional filters, such as ones for navigation and footers. Its helpfulness doesn’t compromise its ease of use. Upon installation, you will not need to make any configuration settings.

Final Thoughts

Lazy load plugins are the reason you get to enjoy all forms of media for a classy website without fear of slow loading speeds. These plugins make sure that no images or videos will load until they are within the scope of the user’s screen. These media forms usually load slower than text content. The lazy loading technique implies that the pages with pictures and videos will load faster and save bandwidth.

Enjoying a smooth website doesn’t have to be costly. Just delve into this piece with the best free WordPress lazy load plugins and select the one you prefer.